by Fiona Walker
Laughing in resignation, Zoe headed upstairs, suddenly rather glad that she was celebrating her birthday after all. Life might not begin at forty, she mused, but that was no excuse not to get one.
Fifteen
* * *
ZOE FOUND THAT SHE couldn’t possibly keep pace with Niall in drinks, although she made the mistake of starting out by trying to do so. Consequently she was pretty tight by the time they even looked at the menus.
A vast fire was crackling nearby, into which Niall tossed cigarette butts at regular intervals. Faces flushed from the heat and the booze, they chatted rather mindlessly about news and views as Ange dashed back and forth past them, occasionally stopping for a chat or to make a recommendation. He was on top form tonight having been highly recommended by Craig Brown the previous week. His peppery pelt of hair gleamed like the pewter tankards above his bar and his coffee-bean eyes were sparkling so brightly that he seemed to have undergone a sea change and replaced them with black pearls.
Zoe wasn’t sure whether it was the alcohol loosening her tongue, or just his manner, but she found Niall remarkably easy to talk to. By the time she was chomping through a large plate of gnocchi, she had already described her childhood and was hinting at the unhappiness of her marriage, a subject upon which she seldom allowed herself to be drawn. There was something about Niall’s big brown ‘talk-to-me’ eyes and astonishing, self-deprecating honesty about his own marriage which left her feeling she could keep nothing from him. She could see why Tash described him as a better listener than the Midland griffin.
‘My ex-husband, Si, is a very driven, very clever man,’ she explained. ‘That was one of my greatest problems, really – he was a total workaholic throughout our marriage, and a perfectionist to boot. When he got home he simply couldn’t accept the fact that his household didn’t run as smoothly as his office.’
‘What does he do?’ Niall asked, refilling his glass.
‘Well, he was a design architect – one of the best; very well respected. But he doesn’t work anymore.’
‘Retired?’
‘In a sense.’ Zoe was unwilling to let too much slip. ‘He had a sort of breakdown in the eighties.’
‘And took early retirement?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Not voluntarily, no, but it was obvious he couldn’t work anymore.’ She glanced away uncomfortably. ‘He developed schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenia, to be precise.’
‘Christ!’ Niall breathed out in horror.
‘It was awful,’ Zoe confessed. ‘Total Jekyll and Hyde stuff. I said he was a perfectionist, didn’t I? Well, it was rather more than that, really. He was so good at what he did, everyone knew him. I fancied him rotten for years before he asked me out – I’d been to interview him for a magazine profile. I was quite well known then.’
‘I remember.’ Niall grinned. ‘I used to slobber over your by-line photo.’
‘Really?’ Zoe blushed slightly.
He nodded and, when she fell silent, prompted her to go on.
‘Well, after we married, Si didn’t want me to work – not in the nine to five sense that I once did, that is. I wrote a column for a while – it was amazing what schlock one could get away with in those days. A quickly dashed-off witty five hundred words about the washing machine breaking down earned me a fortune. I even wrote a novel – a decent one, not the tat I scribble now. But then I got pregnant with Rufus and was pretty ill throughout. Cue for marriage to go downhill.’
‘He wasn’t very supportive?’
She gave a rueful smile. ‘We lived in this extraordinary house in Greenwich that Si had designed – totally minimalist; it won a couple of awards. It was supposed to be low-maintenance, nothing to dust etcetera, but it was actually impossible to exist normally in. There were no bookshelves, pictures, ornaments, nothing. If one left a newspaper lying around, Si would explode. I think Lime Tree Farm would be his idea of hell.’
Niall was watching her closely now, saying nothing, just letting her talk on.
‘With kids comes litter – it’s inevitable.’ She sighed. ‘And I was adamant that I didn’t want a nanny, but I have to confess I wasn’t a natural mother.’
‘You’re a great mother!’ he protested.
‘I’m fine now, but I was appalling to start with; I had killing post-natal depression for months after Rufus, I felt utterly trapped, cried all the time, and panicked if he so much as sneezed. I must have been hell to live with and Si was never the most sympathetic of listeners. Looking back at that time from his point of view, I suppose he equated children with dirt, noise, litter, and a tearful, abstracted wife.’
‘Kids must take a lot of adjusting to.’ Niall poured more wine into both of their glasses, although hers was still almost full.
‘The trouble is, I don’t think he was prepared to adjust at all,’ Zoe went on. ‘He was wildly jealous of my time and started to get a bit fanatical about tidiness and such like. I just thought he was being more of an old fusspot than usual, but by the time India came along, he was really manic about it – he would wash his hands twenty or thirty times after a meal, clean his teeth until they bled, throw away the kids’ toys if they were left out and scream the house down if he found a speck of dirt anywhere. I think we went through about ten cleaners in as many months.’
Niall could see the pain in her face and guessed that, although she didn’t admit it, she levelled a great deal of blame at herself.
‘I talked it over with a psychologist friend and we came to the conclusion that it was obsessional neurosis.’ She rubbed her mouth. ‘She suggested Si should go for Behavioural Therapy. But it was ridiculous – he wouldn’t even own up to having a problem. He’d become more and more withdrawn and unemotional; it was so hard to have a decent conversation with him because he spoke so quickly that his sentences sometimes didn’t make sense – he’d get the words in the wrong order or use words that didn’t even exist. But he was still as quick as lightning if I tried to fool him – I told him that I was going for stress counselling and wanted him to come too; the moment we arrived he realised it was a ruse and you couldn’t see him for smoke.’
‘Go on.’
‘Then the voices started. He was behaving more erratically than ever – doing strange things, such as pulling the kitchen apart to look for some non-existent smell he thought was lingering, or following me to Sainsbury’s because he’d convinced himself that I was having an affair. He even locked me in the bathroom for an entire day once because I was due to meet a friend for lunch and he didn’t want me to go. I was frantic with worry because India was just a tot – Rufus had started school then. But when he let me out, India said she’d had great fun playing washerwoman with Daddy. He’d had her scrubbing and scrubbing her toys in a plastic bucket all day. A two year old! Whenever I tried to talk to him about it, he explained it away by claiming that he’d been told to do it. I honestly started to wonder whether he’d joined a cult or something.’
‘But the voices were in his head?’
She nodded. ‘Obviously other people had started to notice his instability as well – friends stopped asking us out, he began to lose contracts at work, his family backed right off too. His jealousy escalated to insane proportions – he went to one of those spy shops and bought all sorts of surveillance equipment to rig up around the house so that he could listen to what I was doing wherever I was. He bugged all the phones in case I was talking about him and his “madness”. Instead of sleeping at night, he’d stay up listening to the tapes of calls I’d made while he wasn’t around to listen in live. Then one day he found that I’d left a load of washing piled by the machine and went so bananas that he burned the lot – right there in the kitchen, using petrol of all things; the room was gutted and he scorched most of his hair and forehead off in the process.’
‘Jesus! Didn’t you get help?’
She nodded. ‘Thankfully our doctor was an old friend and he coaxed Si into a psychiatric consultant’s office in Harley Stre
et by telling him that he thought he might need minor surgery on his burns – it was the only way to get him there, to pretend the man was a plastic surgeon. Si was in total denial, refusing to admit to a problem; he thought his behaviour was completely rational. The consultant couldn’t believe that he’d been able to live such a relatively normal life – he also said he was unlikely ever to fully recover. The only reason he had hidden it for so long was because he was so bloody clever. Within a week, Si was taking so many drugs he was in a walking coma. His voice was slurred, he was clumsy and forgetful. I’d lost him.
‘I can’t tell you how guilty I felt afterwards – it was just indescribable. I tried to look after him for almost a year, but it almost drove me to madness too – it was like having three children and, despite the drugs, he was still dangerous and unpredictable. He would lock me in the house quite regularly, sticking postage stamps over the locks so that he could tell if I’d gone out. I walked around with spare keys and second-class stamps in every pocket. It was ridiculous, a lunatic life, living with a lunatic.’
‘You still loved him?’ Niall watched her wet eyes glittering as they reflected the fire.
‘In memories, yes, but I confess they faded fast.’ She shrugged. ‘In that state he was bloody hard to love and very easy to hate. He was still clever and had snatches of such lucidity that I almost believed he was better again, but the next moment he’d be thrashing around like a wild thing, telling me I was contaminated or a whore or rank with some infectious disease. Then he’d be catatonic for hours afterwards. I was always afraid that he might hurt the children – particularly as he was so terrified of illness and they were going through the mumps, tonsillitis and chicken pox phase – so I lived on my nerves, never letting them out of my sight. I had no work – no one wanted me to write for them and I can see why now. Everything I submitted was dashed off in such a distracted hurry. At the time I thought there was some sort of conspiracy going on. I even convinced myself that Si had been ringing around all the newspaper and magazine editors warning them off. Of course he hadn’t – it was a time of great change, papers under new ownership and editorship, moving out of Fleet Street, revolutionising their printing techniques and streamlining their teams. There was no call for the sort of happy, chatty house-wife column in an era when the career woman was starting to march into the boardroom and demand her rights. And that silly column I once did was all I was remembered for; I’d been labelled, all my earlier work seemingly forgotten.
‘When Si finally agreed to move into a residential clinic we were practically broke.’ She took a huge slug of wine. ‘The only place he agreed to go was, of course, the most expensive in the country. So we sold the house and invested the money to pay his fees. I took the kids out of school and we moved in with Penny and Gus. I said it was for a few months and I’m still here – outstaying my welcome.’
‘They’d be devastated if you left!’ Niall protested. ‘You hold the ship together.’
‘Well, it’s not my cooking they want me to stay for.’ She managed a faint smile. ‘Although I suppose I make a decent answering service, and the kids are useful spare grooms.’
‘Plus you contribute a huge whack to the mortgage.’
Zoe shrugged. ‘I think that’s one of Tash’s exaggerations. I get a few thousand pounds for each book and most of that goes into Si’s account to keep it topped up.’
‘He’s still at the clinic?’
She nodded. ‘He went through a spell of trying to live a normal life again – rented a flat in London and wrote some academic articles about architecture – but within weeks he was suffering all the old symptoms plus some. The fool had taken himself off all the drugs. It was so sad. He was taken to the police station at one point and sectioned under the Mental Health Act. One of his neighbours had caught him going nuts in the hallway, trying to tear up the floorboards because he thought there was a smell beneath. When she told him to stop, he attacked her.’
‘And now?’
‘He’s still in deepest Staffordshire, designing modern houses that he will never get to build. I visit him every month – I can’t bear to go more, to see the man I loved restricted so dreadfully by his own diseased brain. They really do take part in group basket-weaving sessions, you know?’ She smiled up at him, acutely embarrassed to have spilled so much.
Niall took her hand, giving it a warm, reassuring squeeze.
‘And how are you now?’
‘Fine.’ She gently pulled her fingers away. ‘The kids are so wonderful – but I’m sure there are scars underneath. They were never loved by their father, India comes to see him sometimes and he doesn’t even know who she is – he’s just blanked her out. Rufus loathes him – begged me to get a divorce. He got sort of fixated on it, frighteningly like his father. It took me five years to convince Si to let me have one.’
‘D’you think you’ll ever remarry?’
Zoe laughed. ‘Well, that’s not why I got it – to make myself available. Gosh, no! It was a way of getting some control over my life again, of feeling less guilty about Si’s awful, hellish life. Somehow it allowed me a little distance to evaluate the situation and work out where to go.’
‘So where are you going?’
‘Nowhere for now.’ She pushed her dessert plate to one side, the perfect square of tiramisù untouched. ‘The kids are happy at their schools. I could just about afford to send them to private ones again now, but when I asked them whether they wanted that they both refused point blank. Living with Penny and Gus gives them a lot of stability, a feeling of family unity. And I think Penny finds their presence a Godsend. Young kids might make her resentful and sad, but those gallumphing teens seem to give her the right sense of motherliness without the yearning for a tot. She adores them.’
Niall put down his glass and tilted his head. ‘I asked about you, Zoe.’
‘I’m happy enough.’ She shrugged. ‘Penny and India are forever trying to set me up with men before I get too wizened, but they’ve got hopeless taste.’
Niall laughed. ‘Still you can’t keep yourself hidden away in that farm forever. You’re a beautiful woman, Zoe, you need someone around to appreciate that.’
She smiled gratefully, mildly embarrassed by the compliment but aware enough of her looks not to argue with false modesty. ‘Well, I’ve got two big, noisy kids and very little time, which doesn’t help. I’ve been out with a couple of men in the last few years – I saw one for several months actually – but I find it very hard to trust people after Si, and to be honest I’m more of a London intellectual than a country wife type. Most of the men I meet are locals, or eventing friends of Pen and Gus. I know this sounds monstrously snobbish, but I find them rather shallow and arrogant as a rule. I love living around here, but I think looking for a man is like shopping for coats – one needs to go to London.’
‘That sounds pretty bloody damning to me,’ Niall laughed, leaning back as Ange whisked up personally to remove their plates, mouth pursed with irritation as he saw that Zoe hadn’t touched her dessert.
‘Ees no good?’ he looked at her, eyes lugubrious with mock-hurt.
‘I’m certain it was lovely,’ Zoe apologised. ‘I just have an upset tummy right now, Ange.’
‘Hmmph – why you come and eat here then?’ He flounced off.
But Zoe was gazing into her wine glass thoughtfully, watching the dim, orange light from the fire play in the depths of the Chianti.
‘There was one man,’ she murmured as Niall opened his mouth to speak. He promptly shut it again.
‘Yes?’
‘No – I shouldn’t have mentioned it.’ She took a huge gulp of wine and coughed as it streamed into her wind pipe. ‘Too close to home. It was a silly mistake, really.’
‘Please tell me if you want to.’ He leaned forward anxiously. ‘I won’t mention it to a soul.’
Zoe glanced around, keen not to be overheard
‘I met him at a party,’ she whispered, eyes still glued to her glass. �
��At the farm. It was just after Tash had moved in. You were in Puerto Rico or something glamorous – we hadn’t met then.’
‘I remember. I had half a scene in a Stallone blockbuster. I came to stay a couple of weeks later.’
‘That’s right. Well, it was Gus’s birthday, so we had a huge barbecue all day. Tash was a bit new and nervous so Penny got her to invite a load of friends and family.’
‘I think I recall Gus warning her never to let her cousin Marcus over his threshold again.’ Niall grinned. ‘Didn’t he give Wally a hash cake?’
‘That’s right.’ Zoe nodded, too absorbed in her painful memory to muster a smile. ‘Well, one of her lot arrived late in a very black mood and hardly socialised at all. He came into the kitchen while I was washing up some glasses – we’d run out as usual. I think he just wanted to get out of the throng. Anyway he sat and chatted and drank his way through an entire bottle of red wine. We got on tremendously well – he was so bright and witty, very dry. I suppose we were both terribly tight but you know how it is when you have a good old flirt for fun – there were no fireworks or turtle doves, just laughter and too much looking at one another. I felt like a teenager.’
‘I know the feeling exactly.’ Niall nodded and played with his wine glass.
‘Well, I’m deeply ashamed to admit this, but I behaved like a silly teenager too.’ She hung her head even more. ‘I went into the back pantry for something or other and we were having such an animated conversation that he followed me while we talked. The next moment we were necking like fifteen year olds. It was all rather undignified but tremendous fun. That’s when the fireworks went off – it was so stupid and dangerous, but we were all over each other.’
‘So?’ Niall grinned. ‘Where’s the harm in that?’
‘He was too drunk to drive back, so he decided to stay the night,’ she went on, her face aflame. ‘He kept looking at me in a way that said sex after lights out – it was still very teenage but incredibly erotic. Everyone was pissed and tired – you know what it’s like after parties – so they pitched off to bed. He conked out on the sofa for a nap. I stayed up to clear away stuff and dear Tash helped me, practically keeling over with tiredness. She said she’d had a lovely time and was so pleased that I’d looked after her brother, Matty. Then she explained that he was in a terrible funk when he arrived because the babysitter had let them down at the last minute and his wife had insisted on staying in London instead of dumping the kids at a friend’s which he’d wanted. Apparently they’d had a flaming row and he’d only come down at all to spite her.’